With rapid proliferation of advanced wireless communication networks and devices, traditional security and authentication practices face increasing challenge due to the broadcast and open nature of wireless communications. Both the protection of the privacy of each individual wireless user, and security of critical wireless infrastructures, have taken on increasingly important roles in recent times. The wide deployment of various wireless technologies and dramatic growth of user population have escalated the importance of these aspects of wireless communication.
In particular, the open nature of radio signal propagation and the transparent transmission parameters of the physical link involved in wireless communication create specific issues that must be addressed by wireless security. Security in conventional wireless communications has been considered to represent an issue to be addressed at the higher layers of the network protocol stack. Traditional authentication and cryptographic techniques have therefore undertaken the approach of focusing on higher layers of the network protocol stack.
In addition, most of the known deployed wireless communication systems and networks feature a transparent transmission scheme, which significantly increases the possibility of signal and data interception. Conventional prior art security techniques that provide a high level of security protection in a wired network are mostly inadequate in wireless communications, due to the lack of any direct physical association between the legitimate wireless users. Therefore wired security techniques cannot reduce the risks from the open air interface.
Traditional prior art security techniques are proved to be able to play an important role in combating many security threats, including both attacks similar to those in wired networks and those which are specific to the wireless environment. Due to the lack of a physical association between the subscriber and the wired network, wireless communication network function and operate without any physical connection and this means that the wireless environments have additional vulnerabilities not experienced by wired environments. These additional vulnerabilities include security threats. As a result, prior art techniques that provide a high level of security in a wired network are inadequate for wireless world.
Such prior art techniques include those discussed in the following references: C. E. Shannon, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 28, pp. 656-715, October 1949; H. Yang, F. Ricciato, S. Lu, and L. Zhang, “Securing a wireless world,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 94, no. 2, pp. 442-454, February 2006; K. Bicakci and B. Tavli, “Denial-of-service attacks and countermeasures in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks,” Computer Standards & Interfaces, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 931-941, September 2009; B. Vaidya and H. Lim, “Secure framework for multipath multimedia streaming over wireless ad hoc network,” IEEE WCNC 2009, pp. 1-6, April 2009; G. Thamilarasu, “Cross-Layer Design for Security in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” Ph. D Dissertation, State University of New York, July 2009; Y Sheng, K Tan, G Chen, D Kotz and A Campbell, “Detecting 802.11 MAC layer spoofing using received signal strength,” IEEE INFOCOM 2008, April 2008, pp. 1768-1776; M. Bogdanoski, P. Latkoski, A. Risteski and B. Popovski, “IEEE 802.16 security issues: a survey,” 16th Telecommunications forum TELFOR, pp. 199-202, November 2008; and X. Wang, “Adaptive Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing System”, U.S. patent Ser. No. 12/437,358, May 2009.